I think there's value in that style of definition. I found "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" the most useful explanation of monads. I

I think there's value in that style of definition. I found "a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors" the most useful explanation of monads. I didn't know what an endofunctor—or a moniod—was when I read it, but it gave me some hooks for research. Other explanations using analogies just left me confused, and nothing further I could look into. Though that said, I revised that explanation after the others did not help me, so maybe I had absorbed enough context.